


Asymmetry

by thirty2flavors



Series: in absentia [2]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games), Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Missing Scene, mid-episode 5, past and slightly unresolved august/sasha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-11-14 07:10:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11202996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirty2flavors/pseuds/thirty2flavors
Summary: There are exactly two people left who lived through the most intense month of Sasha’s life with her. That one of them happens to be her ex-fake-boyfriend is less than ideal. Which fits right into Sasha’s less-than-ideal lifetime.//A Sasha character study, with a lot of emphasis is on her relationships with August, Rhys and Fiona.





	Asymmetry

**Author's Note:**

> Set mid-episode 5, several months after Helios falling but pre-getting the band back together.
> 
> You don't have to have read [the thing with feathers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10685532), which follows Fiona and Sasha immediately after Gortys is destroyed, but I wrote this one with that one in mind and it might clear up a question or two about what Fiona's up to.

The Purple Skag is almost empty when Sasha arrives. Someone in the booth looks to be asleep, and a regular she recognizes is slouched over his table in the corner.

And then there’s August, wiping down the bar.

He freezes when he sees her, and Sasha puts on a casual smile, gesturing over her shoulder to the door.

“Tector let me in,” she says, “so either you forgot to tell him I was banned for life, or you really need to find a new bouncer.”

She keeps it as light as she can, arms folded, her weight shifted to one leg, a friendly challenge in her voice. But August watches her over the bar, stony-faced, just long enough to let her squirm.

Then he shakes his head. “Never told him that. Didn’t really think I’d have to. Didn’t think you’d show your face again.” Then, with a half-shrug, “What do you want?”

It’s not exactly an olive branch—more of a twig, maybe—but she’ll take it. She crosses to the bar, relaxing as she walks.

“Just a drink.” Before he can object, she pulls some cash from her pocket. “I can pay.”

He looks her up and down in a way that makes her feel more exposed than really makes any sense, and then he heaves a sigh.

“It’s on the house,” he grumbles, sounding more irritated with himself than with her, which heartens her. He points a firm finger towards her. “Just the first one.”

She shoots him a winning smile and tucks the cash back into her pocket. “Thanks, August.”

He grunts.

Sasha settles herself onto a stool as August pours her a pint. It’s weird to be back in the Purple Skag; for a few months she’d all but lived here, yet this is the first time she’s really herself inside these walls. You’re not supposed to revisit marks. Felix would have a conniption.

Fucking Felix.

“So.” August slams her drink onto the counter like he’s making a point, then slides it out to her. “What’re you really here for?”

“Just wanted a drink, like I said. Honest.” But his gaze is withering, so she shrugs as she pulls the glass closer. “And… to see a familiar face, I guess. Other than my sister’s.”

It’s the truth, and she tries to let him know that by holding his gaze, steady and plain. Sasha’s social circle has always been laughably small, but its sudden expansion followed by its even more sudden collapse has thrown off her equilibrium.

There are exactly two people left who lived through the most intense month of Sasha’s life with her. That one of them happens to be her ex-fake-boyfriend is less than ideal.

Which fits right into Sasha’s less-than-ideal lifetime.

August studies her for another long second before nodding, satisfied.

“You look different,” he points out.

“Keen observational skills,” she jokes, but it falls flat, so she shrugs. “Wanted a change. Made some new clothes. Think I might get a haircut, too.” She strikes a pose on her stool, one hand on her hip. “You like it?”

August only grunts again. Sasha takes that as an affirmation and tries her drink. He’s given her the good stuff—or at least what passes for the good stuff at the Skag—so she may as well savour it.

He makes no effort to start a conversation. Sasha learned some time ago that with August this could mean any number of things: a cold shoulder, a bad mood, or lingering resentment, sure, or simply nothing to say. He’s not much of a talker.

So she takes it upon herself. “How’s business?”

“Dude in the booth’s on his sixth beer.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Yeah, and I’m charging him for a new drink every half hour,” says August. Then he shrugs, and Sasha sees his posture change. “It’s been quieter. Ma’s people used to stop by a lot, and now…” He catches himself and shoots her a defensive look. “Not that I’d asked her to send them, or anything. They just—”

“Right,” she agrees quickly, hoping to spare his dignity. She shifts on her stool and frowns sympathetically. “I’m sorry about Vallory.”

“No, you’re not.”

The look he gives her isn’t angry, but it is uncompromising, and Sasha runs her thumb along the rim of her pint glass.

“No, I’m not,” she admits. “She forced us into a suicide mission that got my friends killed.” She presses down on the glass until her thumb starts to hurt from the pressure, closes her eyes, and pushes out a breath before meeting his gaze. “But... I am sorry you lost someone.”

That seems to be enough; August inclines his chin in a curt but appreciative nod.

“Guess that means you never found them, then,” he says. “Those Hyperion guys.”

Sasha swirls her glass, watching the reflected light dance around the surface of the drink. Not trusting her voice to stay steady, she shakes her head.

“The short one, Van—”

“Vaughn.”

“Yeah, him. He got away from Ma’s people. Tougher than he looks.” August shrugs. “Might be all right.”

She wants to believe him. The truth is she never knew Vaughn very well; when he wasn’t paralyzed and confined to groans, he’d spent most of his time separated from Sasha. The bulk of what she knows is secondhand, recreated through Rhys’ various affectionate anecdotes. It’s possible he has some hidden depths, and nice to imagine that after giving Finch and Kroger the slip, Vaughn beat the odds.

Sasha’s not a glass-half-full kind of person.

“Yeah,” she says vaguely, still staring at her drink. “Maybe.”

“And the skinny robot—”

“ _Rhys_ ,” she corrects, looking up to scowl. “I know you know his name.”

“Right, Rhys—”

“Was on Helios when it crashed. So.”

It’s more irritable than August deserves for what is probably just an attempt at optimism, but there’s no chain of events August can dream up that Sasha hasn’t already thought of and dismissed. Even in the best-case scenario where Rhys somehow made it off Helios alive, he’s made no attempt to contact her, a possibility which comes with its own brand of hurt. Whatever had happened, in the end the truth is this: she hasn’t heard a word from Rhys since he told her, Fiona and Gortys to head for the ship. A Hyperion stooge, risking his life to save a couple of Pandoran grifters.

Who’d’ve thought.

“Sorry,” says August, and she smiles humourlessly.

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, yeah, not really, but... you know. What you said.” He’s quiet for a second, but she can see him debating with himself. Just before she can tell him to spit it out, he says, “I know you two had a… thing.”

“What?” She’s too distracted by the spike in her heart rate to register his unwarranted jealousy. “No, we didn’t. There was no ‘thing’.”

“You’re wearing his pants.”

“No I’m not, these are—these are new. These are mine. I made these.”

“Yeah. And they look just like his.”

Sasha blinks down at her own lap, like she’s forgotten what she’s wearing. Her cheeks feel warm. “I mean I—I guess they do. Sort of. A little.” Then she looks up at August with an innocent shrug. “I... didn’t notice.”

He rolls his eyes. “If you’re gonna lie to me, at least do it better than that.”

Sasha looks away without replying, her one pinstriped knee bouncing up and down on the rung of the barstool. She doesn’t like to think about Rhys, about the secrets he kept or the stupid flower he picked for her or all the things that might have happened to him after she left Helios. It makes her feel like there’s a rakk hive sitting on her chest.

She often wonders what the last thing she said to him was. She hopes it was something kind, something grateful, something worth the sacrifice he was about to make. More likely, she suspects it was something terse and impatient, a product of her own fear. That she can’t remember at all makes her nauseous.

“Rhys is just a friend. _Was_ just a friend.” It feels like not like a lie but like resignation. “There wasn’t time for anything else. Maybe if...” She shakes her head and knocks back a quick swig of her drink. “Doesn’t matter. He’s gone. And so is Vaughn. And Loader Bot, and Gortys… all of them.”

A minute of painful silence creeps by, and Sasha begins to wonder if the complimentary drink is really worth the cost of, well, _this_ : every regret she’s ever had in her life, lurking in the shadows of the Skag.

August breaks with tradition and breaks the silence first. He leans his elbows on the bar, his head level with hers. “Why are you really here, Sash?”

“Fiona and I have been fighting. She’s real big on the Vault Hunting thing and I… kinda never wanna see another Vault in my life.” With a rueful smile, Sasha takes a drink. “She told me she was going to investigate some stupid clue about some stupid key and I, uh, may have told her that if she wants to get her skull crushed by a giant alien monster that’s her problem, and... then I stormed out of the house to come here.”

It sounds silly and melodramatic to say out loud, and she avoids August’s eye. The thing is, Sasha gets it. Vault Hunting is Fiona’s lemonade, a desperate attempt to squeeze meaning and purpose from the Hyperion-yellow lemons they’d been given. She wants to make it worth something, wants a calling that can justify what they went through. If they’re Vault Hunters, all of this becomes a cool origin story rather than just the latest shitty thing Pandora’s done to them.

Sasha doesn’t want an origin story. Sasha wants to lick her wounds and give up.

August’s expression is unsympathetic. “You know you two don’t have to do the same thing all the time, right?”

“Gee, thanks.” Sasha glares, but it melts into something more pitiful as she peers down at her reflection in her drink. “I know we don’t. But it’s not that easy. We both need money. And…” She blows out a breath that sends ripples through her beer. “Fi’s all I have.”

“She doesn’t have to be.”

She can feel him staring but pretends she can’t, pretends she doesn’t know what he’s implying, pretends she isn’t tempted. Chewing her lip, she keeps her eyes trained on her drink as she says, “I don’t have a very good track record with anyone else.”

When she lifts her head, August is leaning back against the bar rail, arms folded across his chest. Sasha finds herself studying his stomach, trying to picture the scar his bullet wound must have left behind.

“Well,” he says, “if you need money, you could start working here again. Fewer people shooting at you.”

She meets his eyes at last, smiling wryly. “Still some, though?”

“Well, yeah. It’s Pandora.”

She’s avoiding an answer, and she knows it. She tilts her head. “Thought business was down.”

“Nothing better for business than a pretty girl behind the bar.”

It’s been a long time since she heard that low note in his voice, but it’s familiar, and heat pools in her cheeks anyway. There’s something about August that’s hard to shake.

He’s not the first mark to get under her skin. It happens sometimes, more often than it should, more often than she’d like to admit. Fiona gives her hell for it, but Felix used to say it’s what makes Sasha so effective at what she does—that people can feel the morsel of genuine connection and they latch onto it, trust her because of it.

He was probably full of shit, she realizes. Just trying to make her feel better about not being as good a con as Fiona. But maybe it explains how she got her hooks so deep into August that even now they have difficulty prying themselves apart.

Watching him now, she vividly remembers how it feels, working with him, sleeping with him, pretending to love him. Slipping back into the role would be like muscle memory. She already knows the staging: hop the bar, grab his jacket, kiss him rough, bite his lip the way she knows he likes.

It wouldn’t be happiness, but it would be a good facsimile. She thinks she could live in the lie for a while.

“August…” she starts, then stops. She can’t think of what to say.

There are many loose threads in Sasha’s life, but August is the only one she can still touch, the one she can tug and tug and tug until it all frays and unravels.

August pushes himself up out of his lean and walks back over to her, so close she really could kiss him. The intensity in his blue eyes is intimidating, but she doesn’t look away.

She swallows.

The Sasha that August thinks he loved was a carefully crafted fiction, all her rough edges sandpapered away for easy consumption. The real Sasha is a more bitter pill to swallow. Quick to anger and slow to trust. Crueler than she means to be and never as kind as she’d like to be. Never willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

She doesn’t believe August would feel the same about the real deal as he did about the character she created. On her worst days, she’s not sure anyone would.

But they’re similar enough, the two of them, at their core: guarded and suspicious, each with plenty of regrets to their name. Riddled with the sort of scars that growing up on Pandora gives you.

“Sasha.” It sounds like a dare. August’s hand creeps across the countertop towards hers, inch by inch. There’s a split second of hesitation, of indecision, her heart in her throat, before—

Finally she breaks eye contact, looks down, studies her own lap again, the black fabric with turquoise detailing. She pulls her hand away, wiping her clammy palm on her pinstriped pant leg.

She wants a change, she reminds herself. A fresh start.

All she’ll get with August is a repeating pattern.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says gently.

August’s shadow disappears from the countertop as he steps back, and she forces herself to meet his eyes.

“Yeah.” His expression is hard to read—sad, she thinks, but relieved, too. “Probably not.”

Sasha sits up straight, takes a breath, and tips back what’s left in her cup.

“Thanks.” She fishes a bill out of her pocket and sets it on the counter. “For the drink.”

August eyes her money, making no move to take it, but no move to reject it, either.

“Yeah,” he says. He maintains the distance between them but gives her one final approving nod. “You take care, Sash.”

She slides off the stool and back to her feet. The smile on her lips is subdued, a little sad, and completely authentic.

“See you around, August.”

As she leaves the Purple Skag, she catches her reflection in the window and reaches up to touch her hair.

Yeah, she thinks, definitely time for a change.

* * *

 

Fiona’s still out when Sasha gets back, chasing after a Vault Key that’s probably about as real as Felix’s. Sasha preoccupies herself with her hair and tries not to worry. There aren’t many people more capable of taking care of themselves than her big sister.

Still, though. Pandora and Vault Hunting are a dangerous combination.

Three days, one new set of bangs, and zero calls later, Sasha’s about ready to tear out her brand new haircut when Fiona finally gets in touch.

“Where the _hell_ are you?” Sasha demands without introduction, practically yelling over the line. “Are you okay?”

“Ha. Uh. Yeah. Funny story. Listen, I’m fine, but I need your help with something.”

Fiona’s voice sounds weird, and Sasha can’t pin down if it’s good-weird or bad-weird. “If this is about a Vault—”

“It’s not... just about a Vault,” says Fiona, and Sasha rolls her eyes so hard it’s almost painful.

“I swear to God, Fi—”

“Plus I’ve got a surprise for you. You’ll love it.”

That sounds more like Fiona, teasing and smug, and Sasha finds herself grinning reluctantly. “Oh really?”

“Promise.” Sasha can tell from the tone of it that Fiona’s grinning, too. “So, how soon can you make it to the Helios crash site?”


End file.
